February 2012 Report
Didn't manage all I wanted, but I hope to make up for that and I did manage a few things.
Art
I again failed to make an Inkscape image, though I hope to make up for this (and January's) this month.
Last month I told you about my sgaartvalentine contribution and now I can link to it:
This image was originally planned as my sga_art_santa contribution for bluespirit_star last year. I spent a lot of time creating the perfect base image by creating two humans in MakeHuman and then posing them in Blender. Then I started painting over that but when I started painting the details of John's face it looked so horrible that I abandoned it and went with my Elf Angel image.
Since then I practiced a bit and read a few skin tutorials and suddenly managed to paint a face that looked vaguely human ;) So I went ahead and worked on John's face (the first thing I detailed). It didn't come out perfect enough so I went hunting for references that I could use as base. Which means I basically cheated. But I'll have to admit that I'm not too proud to cheat. To me the result counts. I'm not in this to become the best artist in history. I just want to be able to express myself and share my works with others.
By using screenshots as base and drawing over them, I managed to get the faces into a presentable shape. Especially John's smile, which I love.
However after doing the faces, I realized one of the downsides of an image as opposed to fic: It's not as easy to limit the scope of your focus. In writing it's pretty easy to summarize parts that are not so interesting. You can also do that in art (and I think you should), but in a portrait like this I couldn't just completely skip the parts I didn't care about, like the clothes. Which look horrible /o\ I could go on about the differences between art and fic and how it frustrates me, but I think that might be a topic on its own as a bit of meta. (And it is
month_of_meta.)
To cut a long story short: I do like parts of the result, but I think I could have spent several more weeks plugging at this image and still not be satisfied.
On to my weekly goals. First up my icons:
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
5. Kate Hewlett in the short film she wrote, "She Said Lenny". That moment broke my heart.
6. Trying myself at a text icon. I find it very hard to incorporate text into icons in an attractive way, so I thought this would give me some practice. I'm semi-satisfied with it.
7. Stephen Colbert from my favorite Colbert Report clip. His masterplan to ruin marriage for gay people starts at 3:40. I absolutely love what Colbert did here. And one of the hightlights is how every step is so very elaborate and detailed, but step two is a simple "Make him fall in love with you". Love that clip, though I couldn't really make a good icon from it. It's so hard to find fonts that look good in small sizes, and pixel fonts didn't seem fitting. I also struggled with the colors. There wasn't much I could do with the base, and I might have just made it worse.
8. This was just a quickie to play with colors and do something with that chevron
9. John in Miller's Crossing. Playing with colors and tried to match his eyes and the background. Close crop. And John's nose, which fascinates me because it looks so different depending on angle and light. It's kind of freaky.
The last two studies were related to my drawing, but the first sketch turned into an actual image:
Rodney's face is somehow skewed. Really, one should think that drawing chibis is easy, but it really isn't. My sketches still had the larger chibi eyes, but they are so hard to do and convey little (as opposed to eyebrows), so I just went with black dots instead.
I still adore it though, because ice cube Rodney is the cutest thing ever. I can't look at him without going, "Awwww". And it even inspired a fic.
In week six, I did a monochrome study of John and Rodney (and Dave) for the mcsheplets prompt "Hide", but since I didn't draw a base sketch, the proportions of the composition went all wrong. I then did a sketch to get a better handle on the proportions of the image, but didn't continue from there.
Then I did a little sketch, just playing with a triadic color scheme and it turned into this:
Color is a powerful element of paintings. (If you want to create your own color schemes, this site has great customization options.)
I also explicitly used a color scheme for my drawing of the month. It's finished (well, as finished as I managed to make it). However, you won't get to see it until June. Unless you're a writer for the
sgareversebang and pick me ;) The same image also includes some elements done in Blender.
Then there was my manip of the month, which was a late addition to sgaartvalentine:
This is another perfect example of what frustrates me as a visual person about art (particularly photo realistic art) vs. writing. When I look at this manip, it's very hard for me to see beyond the flaws. There's the lighting that's wrong along with the colors of the skin, though the really annoying thing in this image is how very, very wrong their hands look. Those are not John and Rodney's hands and it stands out to me so much that I tried to fade to black towards the hands, but obviously they're an integral part of the image, so I couldn't completely remove them. I tried to superimpose their real hands, but there was no way I was going to find fitting source material on time. Maybe I could have tried to fix them by drawing over them, but hands are hard and the idea of painting in all little hairs was nightmarish. I do like Rodney's smile though. And I'm quite satisfied with John's eyes. I had to merge eyes from a different image because John (or rather Joe since it was a Behind the Scenes shot I think) looked not exactly in the right direction.
Fanfic
I posted my MPreg story Expecting.
As for writing: I wrote 7166 words, which is not as bad as January, but still way behind what I have to write. I'm currently 12,000 words behind on my yearly word count.
I wrote two Porn Battle stories:
Sucking a Root, in which John is really, really turned on by watching Rodney suck a root.
The Love of Beer and Other Things, which fails on the porn side. It's about a drunk Joe trying to seduce David.
Then I wrote two things for sga_smooch:
Detour, in which John has a date with a guy and Rodney had a bit of a meltdown.
Ritual of Trust, in which the natives make everyone in the team kiss everyone else in the team. Except John and Rodney. Which disturbs Rodney more than it should.
I have a few days off now and hope to get some writing done (I started a little something today about John as aspiring presidential candidate) and to also finally do some stuff in Inkscape. The two more ambitious images that I did (Family Portrait and the SGA Reverse Big Bang one) showed me that while I can get some pretty impressive results, I'm not sure it's worth the time that I have to spend to achieve them. So I'll try to get back more to writing and to do more simple styles of drawing/art.
Art
I again failed to make an Inkscape image, though I hope to make up for this (and January's) this month.
Last month I told you about my sgaartvalentine contribution and now I can link to it:
This image was originally planned as my sga_art_santa contribution for bluespirit_star last year. I spent a lot of time creating the perfect base image by creating two humans in MakeHuman and then posing them in Blender. Then I started painting over that but when I started painting the details of John's face it looked so horrible that I abandoned it and went with my Elf Angel image.
Since then I practiced a bit and read a few skin tutorials and suddenly managed to paint a face that looked vaguely human ;) So I went ahead and worked on John's face (the first thing I detailed). It didn't come out perfect enough so I went hunting for references that I could use as base. Which means I basically cheated. But I'll have to admit that I'm not too proud to cheat. To me the result counts. I'm not in this to become the best artist in history. I just want to be able to express myself and share my works with others.
By using screenshots as base and drawing over them, I managed to get the faces into a presentable shape. Especially John's smile, which I love.
However after doing the faces, I realized one of the downsides of an image as opposed to fic: It's not as easy to limit the scope of your focus. In writing it's pretty easy to summarize parts that are not so interesting. You can also do that in art (and I think you should), but in a portrait like this I couldn't just completely skip the parts I didn't care about, like the clothes. Which look horrible /o\ I could go on about the differences between art and fic and how it frustrates me, but I think that might be a topic on its own as a bit of meta. (And it is
month_of_meta.)
To cut a long story short: I do like parts of the result, but I think I could have spent several more weeks plugging at this image and still not be satisfied.
On to my weekly goals. First up my icons:
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
5. Kate Hewlett in the short film she wrote, "She Said Lenny". That moment broke my heart.
6. Trying myself at a text icon. I find it very hard to incorporate text into icons in an attractive way, so I thought this would give me some practice. I'm semi-satisfied with it.
7. Stephen Colbert from my favorite Colbert Report clip. His masterplan to ruin marriage for gay people starts at 3:40. I absolutely love what Colbert did here. And one of the hightlights is how every step is so very elaborate and detailed, but step two is a simple "Make him fall in love with you". Love that clip, though I couldn't really make a good icon from it. It's so hard to find fonts that look good in small sizes, and pixel fonts didn't seem fitting. I also struggled with the colors. There wasn't much I could do with the base, and I might have just made it worse.
8. This was just a quickie to play with colors and do something with that chevron
9. John in Miller's Crossing. Playing with colors and tried to match his eyes and the background. Close crop. And John's nose, which fascinates me because it looks so different depending on angle and light. It's kind of freaky.
The last two studies were related to my drawing, but the first sketch turned into an actual image:
Rodney's face is somehow skewed. Really, one should think that drawing chibis is easy, but it really isn't. My sketches still had the larger chibi eyes, but they are so hard to do and convey little (as opposed to eyebrows), so I just went with black dots instead.
I still adore it though, because ice cube Rodney is the cutest thing ever. I can't look at him without going, "Awwww". And it even inspired a fic.
In week six, I did a monochrome study of John and Rodney (and Dave) for the mcsheplets prompt "Hide", but since I didn't draw a base sketch, the proportions of the composition went all wrong. I then did a sketch to get a better handle on the proportions of the image, but didn't continue from there.
Then I did a little sketch, just playing with a triadic color scheme and it turned into this:
Color is a powerful element of paintings. (If you want to create your own color schemes, this site has great customization options.)
I also explicitly used a color scheme for my drawing of the month. It's finished (well, as finished as I managed to make it). However, you won't get to see it until June. Unless you're a writer for the
sgareversebang and pick me ;) The same image also includes some elements done in Blender.
Then there was my manip of the month, which was a late addition to sgaartvalentine:
This is another perfect example of what frustrates me as a visual person about art (particularly photo realistic art) vs. writing. When I look at this manip, it's very hard for me to see beyond the flaws. There's the lighting that's wrong along with the colors of the skin, though the really annoying thing in this image is how very, very wrong their hands look. Those are not John and Rodney's hands and it stands out to me so much that I tried to fade to black towards the hands, but obviously they're an integral part of the image, so I couldn't completely remove them. I tried to superimpose their real hands, but there was no way I was going to find fitting source material on time. Maybe I could have tried to fix them by drawing over them, but hands are hard and the idea of painting in all little hairs was nightmarish. I do like Rodney's smile though. And I'm quite satisfied with John's eyes. I had to merge eyes from a different image because John (or rather Joe since it was a Behind the Scenes shot I think) looked not exactly in the right direction.
Fanfic
I posted my MPreg story Expecting.
As for writing: I wrote 7166 words, which is not as bad as January, but still way behind what I have to write. I'm currently 12,000 words behind on my yearly word count.
I wrote two Porn Battle stories:
Sucking a Root, in which John is really, really turned on by watching Rodney suck a root.
The Love of Beer and Other Things, which fails on the porn side. It's about a drunk Joe trying to seduce David.
Then I wrote two things for sga_smooch:
Detour, in which John has a date with a guy and Rodney had a bit of a meltdown.
Ritual of Trust, in which the natives make everyone in the team kiss everyone else in the team. Except John and Rodney. Which disturbs Rodney more than it should.
I have a few days off now and hope to get some writing done (I started a little something today about John as aspiring presidential candidate) and to also finally do some stuff in Inkscape. The two more ambitious images that I did (Family Portrait and the SGA Reverse Big Bang one) showed me that while I can get some pretty impressive results, I'm not sure it's worth the time that I have to spend to achieve them. So I'll try to get back more to writing and to do more simple styles of drawing/art.